After years hidden away in Sweden, rare photos of San Francisco before the great quake resurface

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In the last decade of the 19th century, a family of Swedes sailed across the Atlantic Ocean to the eastern United States. They likely traversed the major cities of the East Coast by train before steaming across the country to San Francisco.

What they did in the western boomtown is not known, save for one aspect of their travels. They purchased photographs of various San Francisco sights from Isaiah West Taber.

Massachusetts-born Taber first came to California in 1850 in search of gold. He made a livelihood out of another precious metal. Taber traveled around the country taking photographs and collecting glass negatives, which he printed upon silver albumen and sold to tourists and collectors from his gallery above Hibernia Bank.

Taber, age 76, lost nearly all of his collection in the 1906 fire that followed the great earthquake. He died six years later.

The Swedish family visited the photographer about a decade before his negatives — and many of the landmarks they depicted — were destroyed, according to Tom Lamb, the business development director of the books and manuscripts department of Bonhams, the auction house that recently acquired the images.

Considered the postcards of the era, the photographs came mounted on gray cards with red, hand-lettered titles below. The family purchased at least 31 images — 16 depict landmarks, 15 show the sea, including the strip of the San Francisco Bay across which the Golden Gate Bridge would be built.

Many of the places shown in the newly public photographs were lost in the 1906 bedlam. The Crocker House on Nob Hill, home of "Big Four" robber baron Charles Crocker, was flattened by the natural disaster, as was the Mark Hopkins mansion and the now-rebuilt Palace Hotel. The old San Francisco City Hall, also included in the photograph collection, was open for less than a decade before the earthquake crumbled it in seconds.

Not all the images are portents of future destruction. Nearly half depict the largely unperturbed waters of the San Francisco Bay, which could only be crossed by boat at the time. It would be another four decades before a bridge was built to accommodate those traveling by car.

When the original purchasers returned to Sweden, the photographs came with them, and stayed in the country for more than a century. Descendants of the original stateside travelers sold them to a Swedish collector, who then sold them to Bonhams in New York.

Soon, the images will return to the Bay Area. A collector from Marin County purchased the collection, along with four photos from 19th-century Los Angeles, on Tuesday for $1,100.